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Sex in Videogames, Part 1 For the last eight years, I've been employed by Electronic Arts in one capacity and another, most recently as a lead game designer at Bullfrog Productions, EA's UK subsidiary. But at the beginning of September, I cut loose at last - became an independent design consultant, at least while I'm looking for another job in the UK. So what's the first thing a newly-minted design consultant does? Hies himself off to the nearest trade show and hands his business card to all and sundry, that's what. In my case, this was ECTS, the European Computer Trade Show, held annually in London in the autumn. Problem was, when I got there, I couldn't get inside. There was a big crowd bunched up just inside one of the doors. Eventually I slithered through and discovered the source of the logjam. It was a booth for a company selling a product called Erotica Island, and the booth staff seemed to consist primarily of very fit, very tanned young women in bikinis. They were all having their pictures taken by a large number of goofy-looking guys, with whom I doubt they would ordinarily be seen dead if they weren't being paid for it. One of the women handed me a flyer as I went past, but it wasn't until just now, sorting through my mountain of trade-show junk, that I turned it up again. The game, if it is a game, seems to be some sort of strip/sex show featuring animated women drawn in the manga style. No men, as far as I could tell. The flyer suggests it will be pretty explicit, but I don't believe everything I read in trade-show flyers, either.
Erotica Island is definitely not my cup of tea, but the incident got me thinking about the larger issue. What about sex in computer games? Not just scantily-clad Amazons running around with guns, but real sex. Should we or shouldn't we - and if we should, how? Well, to start with, it's obviously not a great idea politically. Most of the game-playing countries in the world have outright censorship in place even if, oddly enough, their populations are generally less uptight about sex than America's. The United States, on the other hand, has the fabulous First Amendment, which is supposed to prevent censorship… and a very vocal, active group of people who are doing their best to make sure that we, the interactive entertainment community, are not covered by it. At the last Game Developers' Conference, Doug Lowenstein, the head of the Interactive Digital Software Association, said something really scary: three Supreme Court justices are due to retire during the next administration. I don't know how he knows this, but Lowenstein is paid to be politically connected and I'll take his word for it. That means that whoever we elect this November is going to have a profound effect on the way the First Amendment is interpreted for years to come. Of course, with the candidates we've got, we're really between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, there's George W. Bush, a Republican. For Republicans, there's no safer political bet than cracking down on corrupt pornographic filth. The GOP is starting to realize that there's more than one opinion about guns, abortion, gays, and affirmative action, but nobody stands up for porn. On the other hand, we've got Al Gore, the husband of Tipper, the woman who took on the music industry over the issue of potty-mouthed rap musicians and won, sort of; and Senator Joseph Lieberman, the game industry's bête noir. Lieberman's not the monster he's often portrayed as by infuriated gamers, but I don't think we can count on Al and Joe for any support, nor to appoint any First Amendment stalwarts to the bench. Whichever way we vote, we probably lose. Now throw in the recent Federal Trade Commission finding that, just as the tobacco industry pretended its products weren't intended for kids and then aggressively marketed to them anyway, a number of game publishers' documents show that they have been deliberately targeting their M-rated games at kids. I'd say that pretty well describes corporate hypocrisy in a nutshell, and so we've just given ourselves another black eye. The bottom line is that the political situation is looking pretty grim for us game developers, and now is not the best time in the world to be turning out sexually explicit video games. However,
there's bound to be somebody or other who will do it anyway for the sake
of a quick buck, and there's not a thing in the world we can do about
it. So let's set aside the political question and look at it from a design
standpoint. How would one tastefully incorporate sex into a computer game?
Very few games actually have sex in them - the industry is much, much
more circumspect about sex than they are about violence, at least in America.
Planescape: Torment had sex in it, but it was purely optional.
It took place off-screen and it consisted only of sordid transactions
with prostitutes. Besides, the game made sarcastic remarks about you when
you did it.
It seems
to me that there are three ways that sex can be made a meaningful part
of a game: seduction, sexual activity, and dramatic significance. I'll
look at each of them in turn. I should add a disclaimer here that I know
almost nothing of gay sexual mores, and I'm only going to talk about heterosexuals
from here on. Seduction Men who play the seduction game with flair and success are called "womanizers," and they are publicly disapproved of while being privately envied and admired, at least by other men. Women who play the game with flair and success are called "sluts," and they are disapproved of even more, though not without a certain wistfulness on the part of men who would secretly like to meet them. Because seduction, especially by men, often involves some kind of misrepresentation, it's seen as sleazy and distasteful. I know of
two games that have been about seduction - sort of. One was the wildly
popular Leisure Suit Larry series, which actually took that sleaze
and made it part of the game, with humor and good cheer. Larry was a loser
on the make and we all knew it. No one could possibly take the games seriously;
they were obviously a joke, and barely even an R-rated joke at that. Light-hearted
and silly, they were quite popular with women in spite of their subject
matter, which suggests how inoffensive they were. The worst
thing about the game, though, was the dialog - the lines they gave you
to say. You didn't sound like a suave and attractive seducer; you sounded,
as one review put it, like a ham-fisted drunk trying pinch the hostess
at a cocktail party. I suspect whoever wrote it didn't actually date much
himself. And just to top it off, there were weird mini-games built into
the storyline. One of the women wouldn't respect you unless you were able
to beat her at - get this - paintball. Well, I suppose it must be someone's
notion of foreplay. The game was non-explicit, incidentally; you went
to all that effort to seduce someone via paintball and the game modestly
closed the curtains when you finally succeeded.
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